Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. It can be used for simple scripting or sophisticated web applications. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, this book gives you insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or a given standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with 133 recipes on the latest version of Python 3.8. The recipes will benefit everyone, from beginners just starting out with Python to experts. You'll not only learn Python programming concepts but also how to build complex applications. The recipes will touch upon all necessary Python concepts related to data structures, object oriented programming, functional programming, and statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively take advantage of it. By the end of this Python book, you will be equipped with knowledge of testing, web services, configuration, and application integration tips and tricks. You will be armed with the knowledge of how to create applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
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17
Index

Using the features of the print() function

In many cases, the print() function is the first function we learn about. The first script is often a variation on the following:

>>> print("Hello, world.")
Hello, world.

The print() function can display multiple values, with helpful spaces between items.

When we write this:

>>> count = 9973
>>> print("Final count", count)
Final count 9973

We see that a space separator is included for us. Additionally, a line break, usually represented by the \n character, is printed after the values provided in the function.

Can we control this formatting? Can we change the extra characters that are supplied?

It turns out that there are some more things we can do with print().

Getting ready

Consider this spreadsheet, used to record fuel consumption on a large sailboat. It has rows that look like this:

...